Police raids homes of tracker admins, seedbox users

German authorities raided the flats of six people associated with an unnamed private tracker yesterday, according to a press release of the local anti-piracy group GVU. Two of the people affected by the raids are accused of being the admins of the tracker, and four others supposedly rented seedboxes to distribute movies, software and music.

GVU celebrates the raid as a "concerted action" against illegal file sharing, boasting that the tracker in question "granted special privileges to users that paid 15 Euros per month." The organization also touts that authorities confiscated seven computers, eleven hard disks as well as 870 CDs and DVDs.

However, if you read between the lines, it sounds like this was really just small fish. The tracker supposedly had 2000 registered members and tracked only about 500 torrents when GVU started its investigation.

Some readers of the German scene news website Gulli.com have argued that the admins of this tracker had it coming because they supposedly operated a paid tracker. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be true either. GVU's release says users paying 15 dollars per month got "a download bonus of 30 gigabytes", which makes it sound like this was merely an option to donate with the added incentive of a better ratio - a common practice with may private trackers.